We're seven games into the season and I feel that for the most part, we've avoided the dreaded "Morgan Rielly Question". To simplify Article 9.1 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, an 18- or 19-year-old player that is eligible to return to junior hockey can have his entry level contract extended by a year if he doesn't play 10 games at the pro level.

At this point, you worry less about "burning" the year off of the ELC, since Rielly has played enough games at the NHL level that he'll probably surpass the 9-game limit once he gets recalled to the Marlies once his junior season is over (EDIT - @birky points out that only NHL games count here). It becomes a developmental question, whether you think that the benefits of having Rielly on your team now surpass the benefits of having Rielly on your team next year after a year of dominating the Western Hockey League.

How good has Rielly been? Well, it's tough to tell, since defencemen are inherently tough to judge by watching alone (since a good defensive play is something that didn't happen) and it's not worth going to the usual websites to find out Rielly's possession numbers. Underlying numbers mean little without context, and the context we'd apply to Rielly's situation is "it's only been five games".

At this point I'm leaning towards "A - keep him up in the NHL". The smallest of samples, but nothing has happened during his five-game tryout that makes me feel the guy isn't cut out for a regular NHL job, and as stated, it's likely that Rielly would pass the 10-game threshold when he rejoins the club at the conclusion of his junior year. We still have four more games left for the powers that be to make a decision, and it will probably be more a development-related than contract-influenced one. I'm a little more bearish on the club's depth than some, and while T.J. Brennan is cutting it up in the American Hockey League right now, he's never shown anything particularly tasty at the NHL-level. Depth is never a bad thing.

You could also flip a coin.

Rielly will play his sixth game of the season tonight, barring disaster, against Carolina.

KEY STATISTICS

Jeff Skinner's PDO numbers and his even strength points per 60 minutes are pretty interesting. I've normalized his points per 60, in the far right column, to 955 minutes a season, or 73 games worth of 13 even strength minutes per game:

Skinner's a fascinating case study because he got off to such a hot start in his NHL career and won the Calder Trophy. He experienced the "sophomore slump" or regression to the mean, when his on-ice shot percentage was knocked down a couple of points. He slumped hard in the shortened season, getting just 24 points in 42 games, but as you can see, that was more related to percentages than performance.

He was a player worth buying low on at the start of the season in any hockey pool you may be in. In my keeper league, I acquired him for Sergei Bobrovsky, since Skinner presents a unique opportunity: not many elite-level guys have had such pedestrian counting level stats over the last two seasons. So far in the season, the gamble has paid off, with Skinner on pace for his best offensive season yet at evens, but the catch is that his on-ice shot percentage is already much higher than it was in his 2011 season. If it can stay in the 9-10% range, my gamble will probably be a good one. If his individual shooting percentage numbers recover, he could be a goal-scoring force again.

Skinner's a fun case study, and if you play any fantasy hockey, he's the type of player I have a lot of success on because everybody else in the league overlooks him. His nose-dive in counting numbers seems to fit along with the time he sat on the shelf with a concussion, and it makes people wary that he will never recover to play at the same pace as his rookie year, ignoring that his rookie season was an outlier in terms of percentages.

If you were naming somebody with the intent of him becoming a sports reporter in the American south, you'd call him "Chip Alexander".

Jeff Skinner was moved off that top line, where he'd spent most of the season to date. Elias Lindholm will miss the game due to a recurring upper-body injury. Generally, head coach Kirk Muller balances out the ice-time for his top three lines and gives limited minutes to his fourth. He's also a zone matcher: the Eric Staal line will get offensive zone starts and the Jordan Staal line will get the defensive zone starts. Westgarth is in the lineup to serve as Colton Orr's punching bag tonight.

STARTING GOALIES

Hilariously, the Hurricanes have played seven games this season, and are 0-2-3 in games Cam Ward plays. He's taken a loss in each of his appearances so far, despite a .913 save percentage and a very impressive .930 at even strength. He's been lit up in special teams situations so far this season, with just 10 stops on 13 shorthanded shots. Ward's had a heavy workload in his career, but he's also lost a lot of games to injury in the last four seasons, so it's unsurprising that the Hurricanes went to get some goaltender insurance in the summer in Anton Khudobin, who was the odd-man out of a pretty good goaltending triage in Boston.

DRAFTSTREET

We currently have a promo rolling out with the fine fellows at DraftStreet.com, a Fantasy Hockey game that allows you to win cash each week. It's on Saturdays only, so it turns the season-long grind into a one-night, action-packed event. Best part, it's free to sign up and you can win $500 in prizes.

This free contest will be salary-cap style drafting where everyone tries to assemble the best team out of the available players.You will have a $100,000 budget to build a team of 2 LWs, 2 RWs, 2 Centres, 2 Defensive players, 1 Goalie, and a FLEX. Each NHL player has been allocated a price based on their expected fantasy performance. You can adjust your roster up until the contest starts on Saturday October 19th at 1:00pm ET at which time your rosters will lock and the Live Scoreboard will be available.